This brief collection description is a preliminary inventory. The collection is not fully processed or cataloged; no biographical sketch, descriptions of series, or indexes are available in this inventory.
The collection of
The
The research files present a comprehensive record of Watson's career from 1900 to 1939 as recorded in newspapers, theater programs, and legal documents such as police reports and deeds. These files contain reproductions of originals held elsewhere, supplemented by a few pieces of Cohen-Niebauer's correspondence from the 1980s. Series I also includes subject files: a folder about Watson's neocolonial house in Freeport, New York, a letter from Helen Hayes to Cohen-Niebauer, and two folders about the murder of Watson's second wife, Nellie (née) Watson, who was murdered, along with her business partner, in April 1926 in a popular Long Island nightspot.
Series II, Publicity Materials, contains a printed flyer and personal and stage photographs of Billy Watson.
Cohen-Niebauer had previously donated a folder of photocopied clippings about Billy
Watson to the Ransom Center. The photocopies and the Billy Watson materials in
Series II were transferred from the Theater Biography Collection to this collection
in 2006. Elsewhere in the Ransom Center, a photograph of
Source:
Cohen-Neibauer, Barbara Elayne.
Gift of Alan Niebauer, 2006 (G 12486); other materials were assembled from the Albert Davis Collection.
Open for research
Helen Adair, 2006